Blogger Tip: Importing/Exporting Blogs and Posts

I've started a couple of new blogs over the past few months. This blog and my fitness blog are actually "spin-off's" of KuyaKevin.com.

I decided to try blogger's new importing/exporting feature. But I didn't want to import all of KuyaKevin.com--I just wanted to import the few posts that related to the new blogs/topics.

Blogger's import/export worked flawlessly: it imported the posts and comments, but I only published selected posts. Here's how it works:

First, take the blog you want to export from. There's an option in your dashboard:

You can just export your blog as an xml file onto your hard drive. It won't mess up the blog you are exporting from. In fact, it's a good idea to do this on occassion so you'll have a backup file for your blog. If your connection is decent, it won't take long. I exported a 600+ entry blog in just a few minutes.

Now, you'll import this xml file into your new blog:

Here's what's cool: the new imports will not automatically publish unless you click this box. This will allow you to select which posts you want to import into your new blog later. If you want to re-publish the entire blog into your new blog, just click the box.

This will show up on your screen while your files are uploading (if your connection is decent it won't take long).

Once uploaded, your imported posts (with comments) will show up in the dashboard of the blog you imported to. If you chose not to automatically publish them, the'll show up labelled as imported--they won't be published yet. Here's what my dashboard looked like on my fitness blog: original post along with (unpublished) imported posts.

The imported posts will also have whatever label they had in the original blog.

Here's how you publish only selected imports:

Go through and select them one by one, or:

1. In your dashboard, click the label for posts you want to import.
2. Once they are loaded, select all of them and click publish.

Now, last step. What about the other posts that you don't want to publish into the new blogger? It's easy to delete all of them. After you have published the desired posts, the imported label will disappear from those specific posts. The remaining unpublished posts will still have the imported label, since you haven't published them.

So, once you've published all the imports you want, you can just click on the imported label and delete all those posts you decided not to publish into the new blog.

You can also go into your old blog, choose the label(s) for the posts you've exported, and delete them (so you won't have duplicate articles).

I really like this feature: if I ever get tired of this blog, I can just import it into one of my other blogs.

Here's the only thing you'll need to keep in mind: go back and fix any link issues caused by changing the location of your posts/articles.